SECTION 1.

CAPITALIST PRODUCTION ON A PROGRESSIVELY INCREASING SCALE. TRANSITION OF THE LAWS OF PROPERTY THAT CHARACTERISE PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES INTO LAWS OF CAPITALIST APPROPRIATION

Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates
from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus-value.
Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called
accumulation of capital. [1]

First let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of
the individual capitalist. Suppose a spinner to have advanced a capital
of £10,000, of which four-fifths (£8,000) are laid out in cotton,
machinery, &c., and one-fifth (£2,000) in wages. Let him produce
240,000 lbs. of yarn annually, having a value of £12,000. The rate
of surplus-value being 100%, the surplus-value lies in the surplus or net
product of 40,000 lbs. of yarn, one-sixth of the gross product, with a
value of £2,000 which will be realised by a sale. £2,000 is
£2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace
of surplus-value. When we know that a given value is surplus-value, we
know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either
of value or of money.

In order to convert this additional sum of £2,000 into capital,
the master-spinner will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance
four-fifths of it (£1,600) in the purchase of cotton, &c., and
one-fifth (£400) in the purchase of additional spinners, who will
find in the market the necessaries of life whose value the master has advanced
to them.

Then the new capital of £2,000 functions in the spinning mill,
and brings in, in its turn, a surplus-value of £400.

The capital value was originally advanced in the money form. The
surplus-value on the contrary is, originally, the value of a definite portion
of the gross product. If this gross product be sold, converted into money,
the capital value regains its original form. From this moment the capital value
and the surplus-value are both of them sums of money, and their reconversion
into capital takes place in precisely the same way. The one, as well as
the other, is laid out by the capitalist in the purchase of commodities
that place him in a position to begin afresh the fabrication of his goods,
and this time, on an extended scale. But in order to be able to buy those
commodities, he must find them ready in the market.

His own yarns circulate, only because he brings his annual product
to market, as all other capitalists likewise do with their commodities.
But these commodities, before coming to market, were part of the general
annual product, part of the total mass of objects of every kind, into which
the sum of the individual capitals, i.e., the total capital of society,
had been converted in the course of the year, and of which each capitalist
had in hand only an aliquot part. The transactions in the market effectuate
only the interchange of the individual components of this annual product,
transfer them from one hand to another, but can neither augment the total
annual production, nor alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence
the use that can be made of the total annual product, depends entirely
upon its own composition, but in no way upon circulation.

The annual production must in the first place furnish all those
objects (use values) from which the material components of capital, used
up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting these there
remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. And
of what does this surplus-product consist? Only of things destined to satisfy
the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently,
enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? Were that the case,
the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing
but simple reproduction would ever take place.

To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product
into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital
anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i.e.,
means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the
sustenance of the labourer (i.e., means of subsistence). Consequently,
a part of the annual surplus-labour must have been applied to the production
of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity
of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In one word,
surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the
surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements
of new capital. [2]

Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as
capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation
of the labourers already employed do not increase, either extensively or
intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the mechanism
of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class
into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice,
not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary
for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied
by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus
means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion
of surplus-value into capital is complete. From a concrete point of view,
accumulation resolves itself into the reproduction of capital on a progressively
increasing scale. The circle in which simple reproduction moves, alters
its form, and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral. [3]

Let us now return to our illustration. It is the old story: Abraham
begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, and so on. The original capital of £10,000
brings in a surplus-value of £2,000, which is capitalised. The new
capital of £2,000 brings in a surplus-value of £400, and this,
too, is capitalised, converted into a second additional capital, which,
in its turn, produces a further surplus-value of £80. And so the
ball rolls on.

We here leave out of consideration the portion of the surplus-value
consumed by the capitalist. Just as little does it concern us, for the
moment, whether the additional capital is joined on to the original capital,
or is separated from it to function independently; whether the same capitalist,
who accumulated it, employs it, or whether he hands it over to another.
This only we must not forget, that by the side of the newly-formed capital,
the original capital continues to reproduce itself, and to produce surplus-value,
and that this is also true of all accumulated capital, and the additional
capital engendered by it.

The original capital was formed by the advance of £10,000.
How did the owner become possessed of it? “By his own labour and that of
his forefathers,” answer unanimously the spokesmen of Political
Economy. [4] And, in fact, their supposition appears
the only one consonant with the laws of the production of commodities.

But it is quite otherwise with regard to the additional capital
of £2,000. How that originated we know perfectly well. There is not
one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid
labour. The means of production, with which the additional labour-power
is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the labourers are
sustained, are nothing but component parts of the surplus-product, of the
tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class.
Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional
labour-power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for
equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every
conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has
robbed them of.

If the additional capital employs the person who produced it,
this producer must not only continue to augment the value of the original
capital, but must buy back the fruits of his previous labour with more
labour than they cost. When viewed as a transaction between the capitalist
class and the working class, it makes no difference that additional labourers
are employed by means of the unpaid labour of the previously employed labourers.
The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine that
throws the producers of that capital out of work, and that replaces them
by a few children. In every case the working class creates by the surplus-labour
of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following
year. [5] And this is what is called: creating capital out of capital.

The accumulation of the first additional capital of £2,000
presupposes a value of £10,000 belonging to the capitalist by virtue
of his “primitive labour,” and advanced by him. The second additional capital
of £400 presupposes, on the contrary, only the previous accumulation
of the £2,000, of which the £400 is the surplus-value capitalised.
The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for
the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale.
The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.

In so far as the surplus-value, of which the additional capital,
No. 1, consists, is the result of the purchase of labour-power with part
of the original capital, a purchase that conformed to the laws
of the exchange of commodities, and that, from a legal standpoint, presupposes
nothing beyond the free disposal, on the part of the labourer, of his own
capacities, and on the part of the owner of money or commodities, of the
values that belong to him; in so far as the additional capital, No. 2,
&c., is the mere result of No. 1, and, therefore, a consequence of
the above conditions; in so far as each single transaction invariably conforms
to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labour-power,
the labourer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far
as all this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of
private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation
of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed
into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation
with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there
is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the
capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of
the product of others’ labour appropriated without an equivalent; and,
secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer,
but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting
between capitalist and labourer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to
the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of
the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever repeated purchase and
sale of labour-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this
— the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion
of the previously materialised labour of others, and exchanges it for a
greater quantity of living labour. At first the rights of property seemed
to us to be based on a man’s own labour. At least, some such assumption
was necessary since only commodity-owners with equal rights confronted
each other, and the sole means by which a man could become possessed of
the commodities of others, was by alienating his own commodities; and these
could be replaced by labour alone. Now, however, property turns out to
be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid
labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility, on the part
of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property
from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently
originated in their identity. [6]

Therefore, [7] however much the capitalist
mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws
of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation,
but, on the contrary, from the application of these laws. Let us make this
clear once more by briefly reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose
culminating point is capitalist accumulation.

We saw, in the first place, that the original conversion of a
sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the
laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labour-power, the
other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use value
— labour — is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which
already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid
of labour equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise
lawfully his.

The value of this product includes: first, the value of the used-up
means of production. Useful labour cannot consume these means of production
without transferring their value to the new product, but, to be saleable,
labour-power must be capable of supplying useful labour in the branch of
industry in which it is to be employed.

The value of the new product further includes: the equivalent
of the value of the labour-power together with a surplus-value. This is
so because the value of the labour-power — sold for a definite length
of time, say a day, a week, etc. — is less than the value created by its
use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value
of his labour-power and by so doing has alienated its use value — this
being the case in every sale and purchase.

The fact that this particular commodity, labour-power, possesses
the peculiar use value of supplying labour, and therefore of creating value,
cannot affect the general law of commodity production. If, therefore, the
magnitude of value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product,
but is found there augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the
seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his
commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used
up by the buyer.

The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values
of the commodities given in exchange for one another. From the very outset
it presupposes even a difference between their use values and it has nothing
whatever to do with their consumption, which only begins after the deal
is closed and executed.

Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved
in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production
and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless, its result
is:

(1) that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

(2) that the value of this product includes, besides the value
of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour
but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate
property of the capitalist;

(3) that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell
it anew if he can find a buyer.

Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation;
each time money is converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken;
on the contrary, it is merely enabled to operate continuously. “Several
successive acts of exchange have only made the last represent the first”
(Sismondi, “Nouveaux Principes, etc.,” p. 70).

And yet we have seen that simple reproduction suffices to stamp
this first operation, in so far as it is conceived as an isolated process,
with a totally changed character. “Of those who share the national income
among themselves, the one side (the workers) acquire every year a fresh
right to their share by fresh work; the others (the capitalists) have already
acquired, by work done originally, a permanent right to their share” (Sismondi,
l. c., pp. 110, 111). It is indeed notorious that the sphere of labour
is not the only one in which primogeniture works miracles.

Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction
on an extended scale, by accumulation. In the former case the capitalist
squanders the whole surplus-value in dissipation, in the latter he demonstrates
his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and converting the
rest into money.

The surplus-value is his property; it, has never belonged to anyone
else. If he advances it for the purposes of production, the advances made
come from his own funds, exactly as on the day when he first entered the
market. The fact that on this occasion the funds are derived from the unpaid
labour of his workers makes absolutely no difference. If worker B is paid
out of the surplus-value which worker A produced, then, in the first place,
A furnished that surplus-value without having the just price of his commodity
cut by a half-penny, and, in the second place, the transaction is no concern
of B’s whatever. What B claims, and has a right to claim, is that the capitalist
should pay him the value of his labour-power. “Both were still gainers:
the worker because he was advanced the fruits of his labour” (should read:
of the unpaid labour of other workers) “before the work was
done” (should read: before his own labour had borne fruit); “the employer
(le maître), because the labour of this worker was worth more
than his wages” (should read: produced more value than the value of his
wages). (Sismondi, l. c., p. 135.)

To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist
production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of
the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view in their totality,
the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But
in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity
production.

Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in
commodity production. The relations between them cease on the day when
the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If the transaction
is repeated, it is repeated as the -result of a new agreement which has
nothing to do with the previous one and which only by chance brings the
same seller together again with the same buyer.

If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated
processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we must
consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any connexion with
the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales
and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it
is not admissible to seek here for relations between whole social classes.

However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding
accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it
always preserves its original virginity. So long as the laws of exchange
are observed in every single act of exchange the mode of appropriation
can be completely revolutionised without in any way affecting the property
rights which correspond to commodity production. These same rights remain
in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer,
who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his
own labour, and also in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes
to an ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position
to appropriate continually and ever afresh the unpaid labour of others.

This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free
sale, by the labourer himself, of labour-power as a commodity. But it is
also only from then onwards that commodity production is generalised and
becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that,
from the first, every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced
goes through the sphere of circulation. Only when and where wage labour
is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society
as a whole; but only then and there also does it unfold all its hidden
potentialities. To say that the supervention of wage labour adulterates
commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop
if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production,
in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops further, into capitalist
production, the property laws of commodity production change into the laws
of capitalist appropriation. [8]

We have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital,
whatever its original source, becomes converted into accumulated capital,
capitalised surplus-value. But in the flood of production all the capital
originally advanced becomes a vanishing quantity (magnitudo evanescens,
in the mathematical sense), compared with the directly accumulated capital,
i.e., with the surplus-value or surplus-product that is reconverted
into capital, whether it functions in the hands of its accumulator, or
in those of others. Hence, Political Economy describes capital in general
as “accumulated wealth” (converted surplus-value or revenue), “that is
employed over again in the production of surplus-value,” [9] and the capitalist as “the owner of surplus-value.” [10] It is merely another way of expressing the same thing to say that all existing capital is accumulated or capitalised interest, for interest is a mere
fragment of surplus-value. [11]

SECTION 2.

ERRONEOUS CONCEPTION, BY POLITICAL ECONOMY, OF REPRODUCTION ON A PROGRESSIVELY INCREASING SCALE

Before we further investigate accumulation or the
reconversion of surplus-value into capital, we must brush on one side an
ambiguity introduced by the classical economists.

Just as little as the commodities that the capitalist buys with
a part of the surplus-value for his own consumption, serve the purpose
of production and of creation of value, so little is the labour that he
buys for the satisfaction of his natural and social requirements, productive labour.
Instead of converting surplus-value into capital, he, on the contrary,
by the purchase of those commodities and that labour, consumes or expends
it as revenue. In the face of the habitual mode of life of the old feudal
nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, “consists in consuming what is
in hand,” and more especially displays itself in the luxury of personal
retainers, it was extremely important for bourgeois economy to promulgate the doctrine that accumulation of capital is the first duty of every citizen, and to preach without ceasing, that a man cannot accumulate, if he eats up all his revenue, instead of spending a good part of it in the acquisition
of additional productive labourers, who bring in more than they cost. On
the other hand the economists had to contend against the popular prejudice,
that confuses capitalist production with hoarding, [12]and fancies that accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued
from being destroyed in its existing form, i.e., from being consumed,
or wealth that is withdrawn from circulation. Exclusion of money from circulation
would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation
of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery. [13] The accumulation of commodities in great masses is the result either
of over-production or of a stoppage of circulation. [14]It is true that the popular mind is impressed by the sight, on the
one hand, of the mass of goods that are stored up for gradual consumption
by the rich, [15] and on the other hand, by the formation of reserve stocks; the latter, a phenomenon that is common to all modes
of production, and on which we shall dwell for a moment, when we come to
analyse circulation. Classical economy is therefore quite right, when it
maintains that the consumption of surplus-products by productive, instead
of by unproductive labourers, is a characteristic feature of the process
of accumulation. But at this point the mistakes also begin. Adam Smith
has made it the fashion, to represent accumulation as nothing more than
consumption of surplus products by productive labourers, which amounts
to saying, that the capitalising of surplus-value consists in merely turning
surplus-value into labour-power.

Let us see what Ricardo, e.g., says:

“It must be understood that all the productions of a country are
consumed; but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they
are consumed by those who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another
value. When we say that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we
mean is, that the portion of revenue, so said to be added to capital, is
consumed by productive instead of unproductive labourers.” There can be no greater error than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption.” [16]

There can be no greater error than that which Ricardo and all subsequent economists repeat after A. Smith, viz., that

“the part of revenue, of which it is said, it has been added to capital, is consumed
by productive labourers.”

According to this, all surplus-value that is
changed into capital becomes variable capital. So far from this being the
case, the surplus-value, like the original capital, divides itself into
constant capital and variable capital, into means of production and labour-power.
Labour-power is the form under which variable capital exists during the
process of production. In this process the labour-power is itself consumed
by the capitalist while the means of production are consumed by the labour-power
in the exercise of its function, labour. At the same time, the money paid
for the purchase of the labour-power, is converted into necessaries, that
are consumed, not by “productive labour,” but by the “productive labourer.”
Adam Smith, by a fundamentally perverted analysis, arrives at the absurd
conclusion, that even though each individual capital is divided into a
constant and a variable part, the capital of society resolves itself only
into variable capital, i.e., is laid out exclusively in payment of
wages. For instance, suppose a cloth manufacturer converts £2,000
into capital. One portion he lays out in buying weavers, the other in woollen
yarn, machinery, &c. But the people, from whom he buys the yarn and
the machinery, pay for labour with a part of the purchase money, and so
on until the whole £2,000 are spent in the payment of wages, i.e.,
until the entire product represented by the £2,000 has been consumed
by productive labourers. It is evident that the whole gist of this argument
lies in the words “and so on,” which send us from pillar to post. In truth,
Adam Smith breaks his investigation off, just where its difficulties begin.
[17]

The annual process of reproduction is easily understood,
so long as we keep in view merely the sum total of the year’s production.
But every single component of this product must be brought into the market
as a commodity, and there the difficulty begins. The movements of the individual
capitals, and of the personal revenues, cross and intermingle and are lost
in the general change of places, in the circulation of the wealth of society;
this dazes the sight, and propounds very complicated problems for solution.
In the third part of Book II. I shall give the analysis of the real bearings
of the facts. It is one of the great merits of the Physiocrats, that in
their Tableau économique they were the first to attempt to
depict the annual production in the shape in which it is presented to us
after passing through the process of circulation. [18]

For the rest, it is a matter of course, that Political Economy,
acting in the interests of the capitalist class, has not failed to exploit
the doctrine of Adam. Smith, viz., that the whole of that part of the surplus-product
which is converted into capital, is consumed by the working class.

SECTION 3.

SEPARATION OF SURPLUS-VALUE INTO CAPITAL AND REVENUE. THE ABSTINENCE THEORY

In the last preceding chapter, we treated surplus-value
(or the surplus-product) solely as a fund for supplying the individual
consumption of the capitalist. In this chapter we have, so far, treated
it solely as a fund for accumulation. It is, however, neither the one nor
the other, but is both together. One portion is consumed by the capitalist
as revenue, [19] the other is employed as capital, is accumulated.

Given the mass of surplus-value, then, the larger the one
of these parts, the smaller is the other. Caeteris paribus, the
ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of the accumulation. But
it is by the owner of the surplus-value, by the capitalist alone, that
the division is made. It is his deliberate act. That part of the tribute
exacted by him which he accumulates, is said to be saved by him, because
he does not eat it, i.e., because he performs the function of a capitalist,
and enriches himself.

Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical
value, and no right to that historical existence, which, to use an expression
of the witty Lichnowsky, “hasn’t got no date.” And so far only is the necessity
for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for
the capitalist mode of production. But, so far as he is personified capital,
it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them. but exchange-value and
its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making
value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for
production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers
of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form
the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full
and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only
as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares
with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the
miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the
social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover, the development
of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing
the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and
competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt
by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him
to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but
extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.

So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital
— endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will
— his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation,
just as in book-keeping by double entry, the private expenditure of the
capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital.
To accumulate, is to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase the
mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct
and the indirect sway of the capitalist. [20]

But original sin is at work everywhere. As capitalist production,
accumulation, and wealth, become developed, the capitalist ceases to be
the mere incarnation of capital. He has a fellow-feeling for his own Adam,
and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for asceticism,
as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser. While the capitalist of
the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function,
and as “abstinence” from accumulating, the modernised capitalist is capable
of looking upon accumulation as “abstinence” from pleasure.

“Two souls, alas, do dwell with in his breast;
The one is ever parting from the other.” [21]

At the historical dawn of capitalist production, — and every capitalist
upstart has personally to go through this historical stage — avarice,
and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the progress of capitalist
production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation
and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When
a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree
of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently
a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the “unfortunate” capitalist.
Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation. Moreover, the
capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal
labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes
out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence
from all life’s enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the
capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the open-handed
feudal lord’s prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind
it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his expenditure
grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the
other. But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed
in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation,
and the desire for enjoyment.

Dr. Aikin says in a work published in 1795:

“The trade of Manchester may be divided into four periods. First, when manufacturers were obliged
to work hard for their livelihood.”

They enriched themselves chiefly by
robbing the parents, whose children were bound as apprentices to them;
the parents paid a high premium, while the apprentices were starved. On
the other hand, the average profits were low, and to accumulate, extreme
parsimony was requisite. They lived like misers and were far from consuming
even the interest on their capital.

“The second period, when they had begun
to acquire little fortunes, but worked as hard as before,” — for direct
exploitation of labour costs labour, as every slave-driver knows — “and
lived in as plain a manner as before.... The third, when luxury began,
and the trade was pushed by sending out riders for orders into every market
town in the Kingdom.... It is probable that few or no capitals of £3,000
to £4,000 acquired by trade existed here before 1690. However, about
that time, or a little later, the traders had got money beforehand, and
began to build modern brick houses, instead of those of wood and plaster.”

Even in the early part of the 18th century, a Manchester manufacturer,
who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests, exposed himself to
the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours. Before the rise of
machinery, a manufacturer’s evening expenditure at the public house where
they all met, never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny
for a screw of tobacco. It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch,
that a person actually engaged in business was seen with an equipage of
his own.

“The fourth period,” the last 30 years of the 18th century, “is
that in which expense and luxury have made great progress, and was supported
by a trade extended by means of riders and factors through every part
of Europe.” [22]

What would the good Dr. Aikin say if he could rise from his grave and see the Manchester of today?

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry
furnishes the material which saving accumulates.” [23]
Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy
expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a
single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. [24] But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production
of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only
a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.
Political Economy takes the historical function of the capitalist in bitter
earnest. In order to charm out of his bosom the awful conflict between
the desire for enjoyment and the chase after riches, Malthus, about the
year 1820, advocated a division of labour, which assigns to the capitalist actually engaged in production, the business of accumulating, and to the
other sharers in surplus-value, to the landlords, the place-men, the beneficed
clergy, &c., the business of spending. It is of the highest importance,
he says,

“to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion
for accumulation.” [25]

The capitalists having long
been good livers and men of the world, uttered loud cries. What, exclaimed
one of their spokesmen, a disciple of Ricardo, Mr. Malthus preaches high
rents, heavy taxes, &c., so that the pressure of the spur may constantly
be kept on the industrious by unproductive consumers! By all means, production,
production on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth; but

“production will, by such a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is
it quite fair thus to maintain in idleness a number of persons, only to
pinch others, who are likely, from their characters, if you can force them
to work, to work with success.” [26]

Unfair as he finds it to spur on the industrial capitalist, by depriving his bread of its
butter, yet he thinks it necessary to reduce the labourer’s wages to a
minimum "to keep him industrious.” Nor does he for a moment conceal the
fact, that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of surplus-value.

“Increased demand on the part of the labourers means nothing more than their willingness to take less of their own product for themselves, and leave a greater part
of it to their employers; and if it be said, that this begets glut, by
lessening consumption” (on the part of the labourers), “I can only reply
that glut is synonymous with large profits.” [27]

The learned disputation, how the booty pumped out of the labourer
may be divided, with most advantage to accumulation, between the industrial
capitalist and the rich idler, was hushed in face of the revolution of
July. Shortly afterwards, the town proletariat at Lyons sounded the tocsin
of revolution, and the country proletariat in England began to set fire
to farm-yards and corn-stacks. On this side of the Channel Owenism began
to spread; on the other side, St. Simonism and Fourierism. The hour of
vulgar economy had struck. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior discovered
at Manchester, that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product
of the last hour of the twelve, he had announced to the world another discovery.

“I substitute,” he proudly says, “for the word capital, considered as an
instrument of production, the word abstinence.”

An unparalleled sample this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes for an economic category, a sycophantic phrase — voilà tout.[that’s all]

“When the savage,” says Senior, “makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he does not practise abstinence.” [28]

This explains how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour were fabricated without
abstinence on the part of the capitalist.

Namely, from
those who ply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others’ industry.
All the conditions for carrying on the labour process are suddenly converted
into so many acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist. If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown — abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature — abstinence of the capitalist.
[30] The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he “lends (!) the instruments of production to the labourer,” that is, whenever by
incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus-value
out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton,
railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly
puts it, instead of dissipating “their value” in luxuries and other articles
of consumption. [31] How the capitalists as a class
are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto
obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely
through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist.
Not only accumulation, but the simple “conservation of a capital requires
a constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it.” [32] The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this martyrdom and temptation, in the same way that
the Georgian slave-owner was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery,
from the painful dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed
out of his niggers, entirely in champagne, or whether to reconvert a part
of it into more niggers and more land.

In economic forms of society of the most different kinds, there
occurs, not only simple reproduction, but, in varying degrees, reproduction
on a progressively increasing scale. By degrees more is produced and more
consumed, and consequently more products have to be converted into means
of production. This process, however, does not present itself as accumulation
of capital, nor as the function of a capitalist, so long as the labourer’s
means of production, and with them, his product and means of subsistence,
do not confront him in the shape of capital. [33] Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in the chair of Political Economy at Haileybury College, discusses this point well in the light of two important facts. Since the great mass of the Hindu
population are peasants cultivating their land themselves, their products,
their instruments of labour and means of subsistence never take “the shape
of a fund saved from revenue, which fund has, therefore, gone through a
previous process of accumulation.” [34] On the other
hand, the non-agricultural labourers in those provinces where the English
rule has least disturbed the old system, are directly employed by the magnates,
to whom a portion of the agricultural surplus-product is rendered in the
shape of tribute or rent. One portion of this product is consumed by the
magnates in kind, another is converted, for their use, by the labourers,
into articles of luxury and such like things, while the rest forms the
wages of the labourers, who own their implements of labour. Here, production
and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale, go on their way without
any intervention from that queer saint, that knight of the woeful countenance,
the capitalist “abstainer.”

SECTION 4.

CIRCUMSTANCES THAT, INDEPENDENTLY OF THE PROPORTIONAL DIVISION OF SURPLUS-VALUE INTO CAPITAL AND REVENUE, DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF ACCUMULATION. DEGREE OF EXPLOITATION OF LABOUR-POWER. PRODUCTIVITY OF LABOUR. GROWING DIFFERENCE IN AMOUNT BETWEEN CAPITAL EMPLOYED AND CAPITAL CONSUMED. MAGNITUDE OF CAPITAL ADVANCED

The proportion in which surplus-value breaks up into
capital and revenue being given, the magnitude of the capital accumulated
clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus-value. Suppose
that 80 per cent. were capitalised and 20 per cent. eaten up, the accumulated
capital will be £2,400 or £200, according as the total surplus-value
has amounted to £3,000 or £500. Hence all the circumstances
that determine the mass of surplus-value operate to determine the magnitude
of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only in so far as they
afford new points of view in regard to accumulation.

It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends,
in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political
Economy values this fact so highly, that it occasionally identifies the
acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labour, with
its acceleration due to increased exploitation of the labourer. [35] In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-power. Forcible reduction
of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part,
for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within
certain limits, the labourer’s necessary consumption fund into a fund for
the accumulation of capital.

“Wages,” says John Stuart Mill, “have no productive power; they
are the price of a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with
labour, to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools
contributes along with the tools themselves. If labour could be had without
purchase, wages might be dispensed with.” [36]

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.
The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always
beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to
it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back
towards this zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already,
the author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce,” only betrays the innermost
secret soul of English capitalism, when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the level of the
French and the Dutch. [37] With other things he says
naively:

“But if our poor” (technical term for labourers) “will live luxuriously
... then labour must, of course, be dear ... When it is considered what
luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea,
sugar, foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &C.”
[38]

He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward moans:

“Labour is one-third
cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard, and fare hard,
as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs,
roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is
dear, they eat very little bread.” [39] “To which may be added,” our essayist goes on, “that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money.... These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable, since
they have been effected both in France and in Holland.” [40]

Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy
to the great satisfaction of God and man. His “Essays” are a cookery book
with receipts of all kinds for replacing by some succedaneum the ordinary
dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly successful receipt
of this wonderful philosopher:

“5 lbs. of barleymeal, 7½d.; 5 lbs.
of Indian corn, 6¼d.; 3d. worth of red herring, 1d. salt, 1d. vinegar,
2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 20¾.; make a soup for 64 men, and
at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn ... this soup may be provided
at ¼d., the portion of 20 ounces. [41]

With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson’s
ideal superfluous. [42] At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English farmers
and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural
labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder
in the shape of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which
the English Dogberries acted in their “legal” fixing of a wages tariff:

“The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the
rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought
not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795....
There they decide that ‘income (weekly) should be 3s. for a man,’ when
the gallon or half-peck loaf of 8 lbs. 11 oz. is at 1s., and increase regularly
till bread is 1s. 5d.; when it is above that sum decrease regularly till
it be at 2s., and then his food should be 1/5 th less.” [43]

Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, 1814, a certain A. Bennett, a large farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian, and wage-regulator,
was asked:

“Has any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up
to the labourers out of the poors’ rate?” Answer: “Yes, it has; the weekly
income of every family is made up to the gallon loaf (8 lbs. 11 oz.), and
3d. per head!... The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the family for the week; and the
3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to find clothes; the
3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of Wiltshire,
and, I believe, throughout the country.” [44] “For years,” exclaims a bourgeois author of that time, “they (the farmers) have degraded
a respectable class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse
to the workhouse ... the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented
any accumulation on the part of his labouring dependents.” [45]

The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer’s necessary consumption fund in the formation of surplus-value, and, therefore, of
the accumulation fund of capital, the so-called domestic industry has served
to show. (Ch. xv., sect. 8, c.) Further facts on this subject will be given
later.

Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant
capital consisting of instruments of labour must be sufficient
for a certain number of labourers (determined by the magnitude of the undertaking),
it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the
quantity of labour employed. In a factory, suppose that 100 labourers working
8 hours a day yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wishes to raise
this sum by one half, he can employ 50 more workers; but then he must also
advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labour.
But he might also let the 100 labourers work 12 hours instead of 8, and
then the instruments of labour already to hand would be enough. These would
then simply be more rapidly consumed. Thus additional labour, begotten
of the greater tension of labour-power, can augment surplus-product and
surplus-value (i.e., the subject-matter of accumulation), without corresponding
augmentation in the constant part of capital.

In the extractive industries, mines, &c., the raw materials
form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this
case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis,
as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, &c. In these cases
the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour,
which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night
shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass
and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended.
As on the first day of production,. the original produce-formers, now turned
into the creators of the material elements of capital — man and Nature
— still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain
of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant
capital.

In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased
without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made,
the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous
effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done
by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility,
without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once
again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source
of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.

Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional
expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure
of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as
extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with
its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional
product the former have created without additional advance of capital,
tells also in favour of the latter.

General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary
creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power
of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation
beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value
and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it
has its being.

Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the
degree of productivity of social labour.

With the productive power of labour increases the mass of the
products, in which a certain value, and, therefore, a surplus-value of
a given magnitude, is embodied. The rate of surplus-value remaining the
same or even falling, so long as it only falls more slowly, than the productive
power of labour rises, the mass of the surplus-product increases. The division
of this product into revenue and additional capital remaining the same,
the consumption of the capitalist may, therefore, increase without any
decrease in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation fund
may even increase at the expense of the consumption fund, whilst the cheapening
of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of
enjoyment as formerly, or even more than formerly. But hand-in-hand with
the increasing productivity of labour, goes, as we have seen, the cheapening
of the labourer, therefore a higher rate of surplus-value, even when the
real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally to the productive
power of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets in movement
more labour-power, and, therefore, more labour. The same value in constant
capital is embodied in more means of production, i.e., in more instruments
of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary materials; it therefore also
supplies more elements for the production both of use value and of value,
and with these more absorbers of labour. The value of the additional capital,
therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation
still takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend,
but the production of surplus-value increases more rapidly than the value
of the additional capital.

The development of the productive power of labour reacts also
on the original capital already engaged in the process of production. A
part of the functioning constant capital consists of instruments of labour,
such as machinery, &c., which are not consumed, and therefore not reproduced,
or replaced by new ones of the same kind, until after long periods of time.
But every year a part of these instruments of labour perishes or reaches
the limit of its productive function. It reaches, therefore, in that
year, the time for its periodical reproduction, for its replacement by
new ones of the same kind. If the productiveness of labour has,
during the using up of these instruments of labour, increased (and it develops
continually with the uninterrupted advance of science and technology),
more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency), cheaper machines,
tools, apparatus, &c., replace the old. The old capital is reproduced
in a more productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements
in the instruments of labour already in use. The other part of the constant
capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is constantly reproduced
in less than a year; those produced by agriculture, for the most part annually.
Every introduction of improved methods, therefore, works almost simultaneously
on the new capital and on that already in action. Every advance in Chemistry
not only multiplies the number of useful materials and the useful applications
of those already known, thus extending with the growth of capital its sphere
of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements
of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle
of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of
capital, creates new matter for capital. Like the increased exploitation
of natural wealth by the mere increase in the tension of labour-power,
science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of
the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react at
the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered upon
its stage of renewal. This, in passing into its new shape, incorporates
gratis the social advance made while its old shape was being used up. Of
course, this development of productive power is accompanied by a partial
depreciation of functioning capital. So far as this depreciation makes
itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the labourer, in
the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification.

Labour transmits to its product the value of the means of production
consumed by it. On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production
set in motion by a given quantity of labour increase as the labour becomes
more productive. Though the same quantity of labour adds always to its
products only the same sum of new value, still the old capital value, transmitted
by the labour to the products, increases with the growing productivity
of labour.

An English and a Chinese spinner, e.g., may work the same number
of hours with the same intensity; then they will both in a week create
equal values. But in spite of this equality, an immense difference will
obtain between the value of the week’s product of the Englishman, who works
with a mighty automaton, and that of the Chinaman, who has but a spinning-wheel.
In the same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman
spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum, many hundred times as great, of
old values swells the value of his product, in which those re-appear
in a new, useful form, and can thus function anew as capital.

“In 1782,” as Frederick Engels teaches us, “all the wool crop in England of the three
preceding years, lay untouched for want of labourers, and so it must have
lain, if newly invented machinery had not come to its aid and spun it.”
[46]

Labour embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life a single man, but it made it possible
for a smaller number of labourers, with the addition of relatively less
living labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into
it new value, but to preserve in the form of yarn, &c., its old value.
At the same time, it caused and stimulated increased reproduction of wool.
It is the natural property of living labour, to transmit old value, whilst
it creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and value
of its means of production, consequently with the accumulation that accompanies
the development of its productive power, labour keeps up and eternises
an always increasing capital value in a form ever new.” [47] This natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital, in which it is incorporated, just as the productive
forces of social labour take the appearance of inherent properties of capital,
and as the constant appropriation of surplus-labour by the capitalists,
takes that of a constant self-expansion of capital.

With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital
employed and the capital consumed increases. In other words, there is increase
in the value and the material mass of the instruments of labour, such as
buildings, machinery, drain-pipes, working-cattle, apparatus of every kind
that function for a longer or shorter time in processes of production constantly
repeated, or that serve for the attainment of particular useful effects,
whilst they themselves only gradually wear out, therefore only lose their
value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the product only bit
by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as
product-formers without adding value to the product, i.e., in the
same proportion as they are wholly employed but only partly consumed, they
perform, as we saw earlier, the same gratuitous service as the natural
forces, water, steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of
past labour, when seized and filled with a soul by living labour, increases
with the advancing stages of accumulation.

Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i.e.,
since the passive of the labour of A, B, C, etc., takes the form of the
active of the non-labourer X, bourgeois and political economists are full
of praises of the services of dead and gone labour, which, according to
the Scotch genius MacCulloch, ought to receive a special remuneration in
the shape of interest, profit, etc. [48] The powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labour to the living
labour process under the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed
to that form of past labour in which it is alienated, as unpaid labour,
from the worker himself, i.e., to its capitalistic form. The practical
agents of capitalistic production and their pettifogging ideologists are
as unable to think of the means of production as separate from the antagonistic
social mask they wear today, as a slave-owner to think of the worker himself
as distinct from his character as a slave.

With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass
of the surplus-value produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously
exploited; and this corresponds, although in varying proportions, with
the magnitude of the capital. The more, therefore, capital increases by
means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of the value increase
that is divided into consumption fund and accumulation fund. The capitalist
can, therefore, live a more jolly life, and at the same time show more
“abstinence.” And, finally, all the springs of production act with greater
elasticity, the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced.

SECTION 5.

THE SO-CALLED labour fund

It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that
capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic
and constantly fluctuating with the division of fresh surplus-value into
revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with
a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, the science,
and the land (by which are to be understood, economically, all conditions
of labour furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it, form
elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field
of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected
all effects of the process of circulation, effects which may produce very
different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And as we
presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say, presupposed
the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous
growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically
practicable with the means of production, and the mass of labour-power
at present disposable.
Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy
Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary
bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. [49]
Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England. [50] In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production,
as, e.g., its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation
itself, become perfectly inconceivable. [51]
The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch,
etc., for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one
part of capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into
labour-power, as a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, i.e.,
the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or
the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth,
fixed by natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social
wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a
material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour
is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number
of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power given (it
changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power),
nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit,
which is moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this
dogma are these: on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere
in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer
and means of production. [52]
On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called
labour fund at the expense of the “revenue” of the wealthy.

What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the
capitalistic limits of the labour fund as its natural and social limits
may be seen, e.g., in Professor Fawcett. [53]

“The circulating capital of a country,” he says, “is its wage-fund. Hence, if we desire
to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have
simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring
population.” [54]

That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that the sum thus
obtained, forms the total value of the “labour fund” determined and vouchsafed
to us by God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the
number of labourers to find out again how much may come to each on the
average. An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It did not prevent Mr. Fawcett
saying in the same breath:

“The aggregate wealth which is annually saved
in England, is divided into two portions; one portion is employed as capital
to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to foreign
countries... Only a portion, and perhaps, not a large portion of the wealth
which is annually saved in this country, is invested in our own industry.
55]

The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus-product,
embezzled, because abstracted without return of an equivalent, from the
English labourer, is thus used as capital, not in England, but in foreign
countries. But with the additional capital thus exported, a part of the
“labour fund” invented by God and Bentham is also exported. [56]

2. We here
take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either
into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versà.
In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity,
free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole
world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere
established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.

3. Sismondi’s
analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect, that he contents himself, to too great an
extent, with the phrase “conversion of revenue into capital,” without fathoming
the material conditions of this operation.

6. The property
of the capitalist in the product of the labour of others “is a strict consequence of the law
of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on the contrary,
the exclusive title of every labourer to the product of his own labour.”
(Cherbuliez, “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” Paris, 1841, p. 58, where, however,
the dialectical reversal is not properly developed.)

7. The following
passage (to p. 551 “laws of capitalist appropriation.”) has been added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German edition.

8. We may well,
therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness Of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property
by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production!

10. “The possessors of surplus-produce or capital.” (“The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter
to Lord John Russell.” Lond., 1821.)

11. “Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing that all the wealth
in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become the interest
on capital.” (London, Economist, 19th July, 1851.)

12. “No political economist of the present day can by saving mean.mere hoarding: and beyond this contracted and insufficient proceeding, no use of the term in reference to the national wealth can
well be imagined,. but that which must arise from a different application
of what is saved, founded upon a real distinction between the different
kinds of labour maintained by it.” (Malthus, l. c., pp. 38, 39.)

13. Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old usurer Gobseck
as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities.

15. In this sense Necker speaks of the “objets de faste et de somptuosité,” [things of pomp and luxury] of which “le temps a grossi l’accummulation,” [accumulation has grown with time] and which “les lois de propriété ont rassemblés dans une seule classe de la société.” [the laws of property have brought into the hands of one class of society alone] (Oeuvres de M. Necker, Paris and Lausanne, 1789, t. ii., p. 291.)

17. In spite of his “Logic,” John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as this when made by his predecessors, an analysis which, even from the bourgeois standpoint of the science, cries out for rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism of
a disciple, the confusion of his master’s thoughts. So here: “The capital
itself in the long run becomes entirely wages, and when replaced by the
sale of produce becomes wages again.”

18. In his description of the process of reproduction, and of accumulation, Adam Smith, in many ways, not only
made no advance, but even lost considerable ground, compared with his predecessors,
especially by the Physiocrats. Connected with the illusion mentioned in
the text, is the really wonderful dogma, left by him as an inheritance
to Political Economy, the dogma, that the price of commodities is made
up of wages, profit (interest) and rent, i.e., of wages and surplus-value.
Starting from this basis, Storch naively confesses, “Il est impossible
de résoudre le prix nécessaire dans ses éléments les plus simples.”
[... it is impossible to resolve the necessary price into its simplest elements] (Storch, l. c., Petersb. Edit., 1815, t. ii., p. 141, note.)
A fine science of economy this, which declares it impossible to resolve
the price of a commodity into its simplest elements! This point will be
further investigated in the seventh part of Book iii.

19. The reader will notice, that the word revenue is used in a double sense: first, to designate surplus-value
so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital; secondly, to
designate the part of that fruit which is periodically consumed by the
capitalist, or added to the fund that supplies his private consumption.
I have retained this double meaning because it harmonises with the language
of the English and French economists.

20. Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text, Luther shows
very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich.
“The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer
is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them
in such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money....
Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man
commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man
or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his
stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten
by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much
flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share
it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in
the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is
there, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a
gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men. Turks, soldiers,
and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they let the people live, and Confess
that they are bad, and enemies, and do, nay, must, now and then show pity
to some. But a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole
world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies,
so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him
as from a God, and be his serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains,
rings, to wipe his mouth, to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man
.... Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all,
more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would
be thought pious, so that people may not see where the oxen have gone,
that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the cry of
the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and
among rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus
means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything.
And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out,
because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their
foot-prints, that they have been let out. So the usurer would deceive the
world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, which he, however,
rends, and eats all alone... And since we break on the wheel, and behead
highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break
on the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers.” (Martin
Luther, l. c.)

24. Even J. B. Say says: “Les épargnes des riches se font aux dépens des pauvres.” [the savings of the rich are made at the expense of the poor] “The Roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense of society.... It can almost be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians, on what it keeps out of the remuneration of labour.” (Sismondi: “études, &c.,” t. i., p. 24.)

28. (Senior, “Principes fondamentaux del’Écon. Pol.” trad. Arrivabene. Paris, 1836, p. 308.) This was
rather too much for the adherents of the old classical school. “Mr. Senior
has substituted for it” (the expression, labour and,profit) “the expression
labour and Abstinence. He who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment
which its expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the
use of the capital productively, which is the cause of profits.” (John
Cazenove, l. c., p. 130, Note.) John St. Mill, on the contrary, accepts
on the one hand Ricardo’s theory of profit, and annexes on the other hand
Senior’s “remuneration of abstinence.” He is as much at home in absurd
contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source
of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make
the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence”
from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence
from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence
from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in
a wwhile, over Spinoza’s: “Determinatio est Negatio.”

30. “No one ... will sow his wheat, for instance, and allow it to remain a twelvle month in the ground, or leave
his wine in a cellar for years, instead of consuming these things or their
equivalent at once ... unless he expects to acquire additional value, &c.”
(Scrope, “Polit. Econ.,” edit. by A. Potter, New York, 1841, pp. 133-134.)

31. “La privation que s’impose le capitalisté, en prêtant [The deprivation the capitalist imposes on himself by lending ...] (this euphemism used, for the purpose of identifying, according to the approved method of vulgar economy, the labourer who is exploited, with the industrial capitalist who exploits, and to whom other capitalists lend money) ses instruments de production au travailleur, au lieu d’en consacrer la valeur à son propre usage, en la transforment en objets d’utilité
ou d’agrément.” [his instruments of production to the worker, instead of devoting their value to his own consumption, by transforming them into objects of utility or pleasure] (G. de Molinari, l. c., p. 36.)

33. “The particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress of national capital, change
at different stages of their progress, and are, therefore, entirely different
in nations occupying different positions in that progress.... Profits ...
unimportant source of accumulation, compared with wages and rents, in the
earlier stages of society.... When a considerable advance in the powers
of national industry has actually taken place, profits rise into comparative
importance as a source of accumulation.” (Richard Jones, “Textbook, &c.,”
pp. 16, 21.)

35. “Ricardo says: ‘In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of employing’ (i.e.,
exploiting) ‘labour is more or less rapid, and must in all cases depend
on the productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour are
generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land.’ If, in
the first sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness
of that aliquot part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labour
produced it, the sentence is nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot
part is the fund whence capital can, if the owner pleases, be accumulated.
But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile land.”
(“Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, &c.” pp. 74, 75.)

37. “An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” Lond., 1770, P. 44. The Times of December, 1866, and January, 1867,
in like manner published certain outpourings of the heart of the English
mine-owner, in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured,
who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them to
live for their “masters.” The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but
to figure in The Times as model labourers! In the beginning of February,
1867, came the answer: strike of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put
down by powder and lead.

39. The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing labourer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way,
the French agricultural labourers.

40. l. c., pp. 70, 71. Note in the 3rd German edition: today, thanks to the competition on the world-market,
established since then, we have advanced much further. “If China,” says
Mr. Stapleton, M.P., to his constituents, “should become a great manufacturing
country, I do not see how the manufacturing population of Europe could
sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors.”
(Times, Sept. 3, 1873, p. 8.) The wished-for goal of English capital
is no longer Continental wages but Chinese.

41. Benjamin Thompson: “Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c.,” 3 vols., Lond, 1796-1802, vol.
i., p. 294. In his “The State of the Poor, or an History of the labouring
Classes in England, &c.,” Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian
beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully warns the English
labourers that “many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that
very comfortably, for months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed
with only water and salt.” (l. c., vol. i, book i., ch. 2, p. 503.) The
same sort of hints in the 19th century. “The most wholesome mixtures of
flour having been refused (by the English agricultural labourer)... in
Scotland, where education is better, this prejudice is, probably, unknown.”
(Charles H. Parry, M. D., “The Question of the Necessecity of the Existing
Corn Laws Considered.” London, 1816,, p. 69.) This same Parry, however,
complains that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition
than in Eden’s time (1797.)

42. From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of subsistence, it will be seen that
the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception in England.
E.g., the examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different
chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour,
gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain an atom of morphia.

43. G. B. Newnham (barrister-at-law): “A Review of the Evidence before the Committee of the two Houses of Parliament on the Com Laws.” Lond., 1815, p. 20, note.

45. C. H. Parry, l. c., pp. 77, 69. The landlords, on their side, not only “indemnified” themselves for the Anti-Jacobin War, which they waged in the name of England, but enriched themselves enormously. Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, “and in one instance, increased sixfold in eighteen years.” (I. c., pp. 100, 101.)

47. Classic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labour process, and of the process of creating
value-, never properly grasped this weighty element of reproduction, as
may be seen in Ricardo; he says, e.g., whatever the change in productive
power, “a million men always produce in manufactures the same value.” This
is accurate, if the extension and degree of Intensity of their labour are
given. But it does not prevent (this Ricardo overlooks in certain conclusions
he draws) a million men with different powers of productivity in their
labour, turning into products very different masses of the means of production,
and therefore preserving in their products very different masses of value;
in consequence of which the values of the products yielded may vary considerably.
Ricardo has, it may be noted in passing, tried in vain to make clear to
J. B. Say, by that very example, the difference between use value (which
he here calls wealth or material riches) and exchange-value. Say answers:
“Quant à la difficulté qu’élève Mr. Ricardo
en disant que, par des procédés mieux entendus un million
de personnes peuvent produire deux fois, trois fois autant de richesses,
sans produire plus de valeurs, cette difficulté n’est pas une lorsque
l’on considére, ainsi qu’on le doit, la production comme un échange
dans lequel on donne les services productifs de son travail, de sa terre,
et de ses capitaux, pour obtenir des produits. C’est par le moyen de ces
services productifs, que nous acquérons tous les produits qui sont
au monde. Or... nous sommes d’autant plus riches, nos services productifs
ont d’autant plus de valeur qu’ils obtiennent dans l’échange appelé
production une plus grande quantité de choses utiles.” [As for the difficulty raised by Ricardo when he says that, by using better methods of production, a million people can produce two or three times as much wealth, without producing any more value, this difficulty disappears when one bears in mind, as one should, that production is like an exchange in which a man contributes the productive services of his labour, his land, and his capital, in order to obtain products. It is by means of these productive services that we acquire all the products existing in the world. Therefore ... we are richer, our productive services have the more value, the greater the quantity of useful things they bring in through the exchange which is called production] (J. B. Say, “Lettres à M. Malthus,” Paris, 1820, pp. 168, 169.) The “difficulté”
— it exists for him, not for Ricardo — that Say means to clear up is
this: Why does not the exchange-value of the use values increase, when
their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of
labour? Answer: the difficulty is met by calling use value, exchange-value,
if you please. Exchange-value is a thing that is connected one way or another
with exchange. If therefore production is called an exchange of labour
and means of production against the product, it is clear as day that you
obtain more exchange-value in proportion as the production yields more
use value. In other words, the more use values, e.g., stockings, a working-day
yields to the stocking-manufacturer, the richer is he in stockings. Suddenly,
however, Say recollects that “with a greater quantity” of stockings their
“price” (which of course has nothing to do with their exchange-value!)
falls “parce que la concurrence les (les producteurs) oblige à donner les
produits pour ce qu’ils leur coûtent... [because competition obliges them (the producers) to sell their products for what they cost to make] But whence does the profit come,
if the capitalist sells the commodities at cost-price? Never mind! Say
declares that, in consequence of increased productivity, every one now
receives in return for a given equivalent two pairs of stockings instead
of one as before. The result he arrives at, is precisely that proposition
of Ricardo that he aimed at disproving. After this mighty effort of thought,
he triumphantly apostrophises Malthus in the words: “Telle est, monsieur,
la doctrine bien liée, sans laquelle il est impossible, je le déclare,
d’expliquer les plus grandes difficultés de l’économie politique,
et notamment, comment il se peut qu’une nation soit plus riche lorsque
ses produits diminuent de valeur, quoique la richesse soit de la valeur.”
[This, Sir, is the well-founded doctrine without which it is impossible, I say, to explain the greatest difficulties in political economy, and, in particular, to explain why it is that a nation can be richer when its products fall in value, even though wealth is value]
(l. c., p. 170.) An English economist remarks upon the conjuring tricks
of the same nature that appear in Say’s “Lettres”: “Those affected ways
of talking make up in general that which M. Say is pleased to call his
doctrine and which he earnestly urges Malthus to teach at Hertford, as
it is already taught ‘dans plusieurs parties de l’Europe.’ He says, ‘Si
vous trouvez une physionomie de paradoxe à toutes ces propositions,
voyez les choses qu’elles expriment, et j’ose croire qu’elles vous paraîtront
fort simples et fort raisonnables.’ [in numerous parts of Europe ... If all those propositions appear paradoxical to you, look at the things they express, and I venture to believe that they will then appear very simple and very rational] Doubtless, and in consequence of the
same process, they will appear everything else, except original.” (“An
Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,”
pp. 116, 110.)

48. MacCulloch took out a patent for “wages of past labour,” long before Senior did for “wages of abstinence.”

50. Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in
no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so
self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham.
He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen
had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a
dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced
from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise
all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility,
must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature
as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With
the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the
English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer
normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure,
then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion,
e.g., is “useful,” “because it forbids in the name of religion the same
faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.” Artistic criticism
is “harmful,” because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin
Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, “nuila
dies sine line!,” piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my
friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of
bourgeois stupidity.

51. “Political economists are too apt to consider a certain quantity of capital and a certain number of labourers
as productive instruments of uniform power, or operating with a certain
uniform intensity.... Those... who maintain ... that commodities are the
sole agents of production ... prove that production could never be enlarged,
for it requires as an indispensable condition to such an enlargement that
food, raw materials, and tools should be previously augmented; which is
in fact maintaining that no increase of production can take place without
a previous increase, or, in other words, that an increase is impossible.”
(S. Bailey: “Money and its Vicissitudes,” pp. 58 and 70.) Bailey criticises
the dogma mainly from the point of view of the process of circulation.

52. John Stuart Mill, in his “Principles of Political Economy,” says: “The really exhausting and the really repulsive
labours instead of being better paid than others, are almost invariably
paid the worst of all.... The more revolting the occupation, the more certain
it is to receive the minimum of remuneration.... The hardships and the
earnings, instead of being directly proportional, as in any just arrangements
of society they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another.”
To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that although men like John Stuart
Mill are to blame for the contradiction between their traditional economic
dogmas and their modern tendencies, it would be very wrong to class them
with the herd of vulgar economic apologists.

53. H. Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. “The Economic position of the British labourer.” London, 1865, p. 120.

54. I must here remind the reader that the categories, “variable and constant capital,” were first used by me.
Political Economy since the time of Adam Smith has confusedly mixed up
the essential distinctions involved in these categories, with the mere
formal differences, arising out of the process of circulation, of fixed
and circulating capital. For further details on this point, see Book II.,
Part II.

56. It might be said that not only capital, but also labourers, in the shape of emigrants, are annually exported from
England. In the text, however, there is no question of the peculium of
the emigrants, who are in great part not labourers. The sons of farmers
make up a great part of them. The additional capital annually transported
abroad to be put out at interest is in much greater proportion to the annual
accumulation than the yearly emigration is to the yearly increase of population.